Friday Social Round Up: Twitter Cards, Nike Ban and Facebook Adware

#FSRU Video 2

Twitter cards

This week Twitter launched Twitter cards. According to their developer blog, this makes “it possible for you to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content.” To make this possible, you will need to add a few lines of simple HTML to your website. When users Tweet links to your content, the tweet will have what is known as a 'card'.

Twitter cards are believed to do three things:

Gives publishers control over how content is displayed on Twitter

Increase traffic to the site

Increase the number of people following your Twitter accounts through content attribution

There are three different types of cards depending on the content that is being tweeted. The first is a summary, which is the default card, which includes a title, description, image and Twitter account attribution. The two other types are photo and player cards, which display images, video, audio and other kinds of media.

All Twitter cards will be displayed on both web and mobile.

Nike ad gets banned

On Wednesday it was announced that Nike has become the first UK company to have a Twitter campaign banned after the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) decided that tweets from the personal accounts of footballers Wayne Rooney and Jack Wilshere were not clearly marked as adverts. Nike ran the campaign with the strap line “Make It Count”, but the ASA decided that, despite both footballers being sponsored by the brand, it was unclear to Twitter users that it was an ad.

Nike argued that the link was clearly branded Nike, while the company also said that they had discussed both players' “goals for 2012” and that they were both free to independently reply to or retweet users “at their own discretion”.

"We considered that the Nike reference was not prominent and could be missed…We considered there was nothing obvious in the tweets to indicate they were Nike marketing communications."

They also added:

"In the absence of such an indication, for example #ad, we considered the tweets were not obviously identifiable as Nike marketing communications and therefore concluded they breached the [advertising] code. The ads must no longer appear. We told Nike to ensure that its advertising was obviously identifiable as such."

Despite the ruling, Wayne Rooney’s tweet is still live. Jack Wilshere is reported to have deactivated his account after he received tweets claiming he had tested positive for cocaine. Wilshere has spoken to the police but not filed charges. Arsenal released the following statement regarding the situation:

“The rumoured reason on social networks behind Jack’s absence this past season is entirely fabricated and false.”

Facebook Adware

Facebook have been releasing all sorts of updates in recent months, and with the Facebook IPO falling short due to concerns of monetising the platform, you could be forgiven for thinking a massive ad smack bang in the middle of your profile is their proposed new way of generating revenue. However, this is not the case. On Facebook’s Adware Page, they have stated that“Facebook ads will never appear as banners in the center, top or left column of Facebook web pages.”

What you are actually seeing is adware that has been installed when users have added a program that offers features such as seeing who has viewed your profile. Facebook have provided step by step instructions on how to remove the adware.